I have heard about Markus Heitz but I've never read his books. He's a German fantasy author whose most famous work is his Dwarves sequence.

If anyone cares, SFX magazine's review of his the first Dwarves novel was generally positive, noting that it's sometimes a little hard to take serious (Apparently some of the character names are a bit on the laughable side), not all that original but strangely readable.